I run a pi-hole as well and I have to say it's been an absolutely great addition to my home network.

It essentially blocks tracking and advertisements on all devices, not just my computers with ad block. Just need to keep the block lists up to date every couple weeks, but it's honestly great.

I wish pi-hole was just a tiny bit more polished. I found it takes a lot of work (and knowledge of linux networking) to get up and running properly and stable.

A great option I've found is to use the DietPi distribution that has Pi-hole configuration/install wizard built in (https://dietpi.com)

After having various weird network issues and instability on a different OS with Pi-hole (updates often broke), I switched to DietPi, and now my PiHole and OS upgrades are extremely stable.

The DietPi installer/configuration for Pi-hole sets up all the networking for you in the install "wizard", took all the weird networking headaches out for me

What issues have you encountered? I haven't seen any problems with it.

I've run into the same. It often would come back from a reboot without DNS restarted correctly. I never went through a Pi Hole update without having to manually fix things either.

A few weeks ago I switched to Ad Guard Home. Has been rock solid since. The big dancehaus it doesn't support the exact same filter files.

I believe you can add your own filter files, so in this sense you could basically link the same ones right?

Definitely, and I've added some of the same ones.

What I meant is it doesn't seem to parse the same range of formats, so it rejected some of Pi Hole's filters as malformed.

Yeah - I found it ironic that out of the box I couldn't get a pi-hole to do DNS lookups. It always took manual fixing.

I know this isn't terribly helpful to you, but I have never had any problems with using or upgrading Pi Hole. I have been running mine for a few years now, and everything has been smooth and error-free.

What else would you recommend along side pi-hole, something easy to setup and maintain like pihole?

MotionEye OS is good as a camera surveillance system. Needs a USB camera or a Raspberry Pi camera. Takes a bit of tweaking to get the optimal camera settings (using a GUI), but then it works well. LibeElec is useful as a home theatre setup, based on Kodi.

Second the idea of MotionEye OS - I have one running as a camera for the front door of my house, emailing me when it triggers to my phone's gmail account. So I have a kind of running "backup" of events if anything happens.

I use to run ZoneMinder on an old PC, but it was a bit flakey, way too crazy to set up for a home system; I had learned how to config and admin it over the last several years, but I was just plain tired of it. It's another great system for security cameras, but not really for a home, unless you have a ton of cameras that need monitoring, and don't mind the dedication of a beefy machine to the task.

MotionEye OS is more a distributed solution. It is possible to set it up so one install can monitor multiple cameras (in some manner - I haven't played with it), but I like it as a simple single IP camera turn-key solution. It basically can turn a Rasperry Pi into a cheap wireless IP camera that isn't locked down or tied to a proprietary ($) cloud system.

Using a RasPi Zero W and the cheapest camera you can find, you can build such a camera for under $50.00 USD off Amazon; probably cheaper if you shop around a bit more. The only cheaper option I've found (but it takes more to set it up properly) is the ESP32 camera modules that you can get.

I haven't looked at LibreElec in a while - have they improved the setup for infrared receivers and remotes? That's the main thing that caused me to switch to OSMC. I'm using an IR receiver hooked to the GPIO pins, and OSMC made it quite simple to set up with my old RC6 remote.

PiVPN, if you have the need to remote access your home network:

http://www.pivpn.io/

I have one with rutorrent that acts our house seedbox / file server. I also added droppy as a simple, user friendly file browser for my flatmates. Obviously, this all runs on docker-compose, because I'm a very weak man (but also, it makes managing the whole thing trivial once setup)

I have a raspberry pi zero w that I use with PivPN and Pihole and also I compiled tor on it. I can vpn into my home network , use tor as my socks 5 proxy and I also use pinhole to deal with tracking and advertising. best 5 dollars I've ever spent.

I used to run pi-hole, but just switched over to: nextdns.io It works like a charm!